Cloudinary
Image and video storage, transformation, and CDN delivery platform with a forever-free plan of 25 monthly credits and no credit card required.
- Card required
- No
Cloudinary scores 4.3/10 for free value in Storage. The main constraint: Free forever plan: 25 monthly credits (1 credit = ~1GB storage, ~1GB bandwidth, or ~1,000 transformations), 3 users, 1 account. No credit card required.
Free value score
4.3 / 10Show the math
Key metrics
What you get
25 monthly credits free forever, no credit card
Credits flexibly cover storage, bandwidth, or transformations
Built-in CDN delivery, image/video transcoding, and upload widget
Access to free add-ons and MCP servers
Gotchas
- 25 monthly credits
Free plan provides 25 credits per month that reset each cycle; 1 credit covers roughly 1 GB storage, 1 GB bandwidth, or 1,000 transformations.
- 1 account, 3 users
The free tier is limited to a single Cloudinary account with a maximum of 3 user seats.
- No custom domain (CNAME)
Custom domain (CNAME) support is gated behind the Advanced ($224/mo) plan and above; free users must use Cloudinary's res.cloudinary.com subdomain.
- No own-S3 backup
Backing up media assets to your own S3 bucket requires the Plus plan or higher.
- No advanced auth options
Authentication options (token-based signed URLs, allowlists/blocklists beyond basic) are restricted to paid plans.
- Limited add-on access
Only free add-ons are accessible; paid add-ons (background removal, auto-tagging search, etc.) require a paid plan.
- No paid-tier support SLA
Free users are limited to community forums, tickets, and email support with no expedited or dedicated support.
Sources
-
"3 Users / 1 Account 25 monthly credits ... $0 Free forever No cc required"
https://cloudinary.com/pricing -
"One credit can be used for: 1000 transformations ... 1 GB of managed storage ... 1 GB of delivered bandwidth"
https://cloudinary.com/documentation/developer_onboarding_faq_credits -
"Transformations and bandwidth are measured over a rolling 30-day window, not a monthly calendar reset. ... It never resets to zero at the start of a calendar month"
https://cloudinary.com/documentation/developer_onboarding_faq_credits -
"Cloudinary's free tier allows 500 requests per hour – enough for a small project to work without issue but not enough to warrant potential misuse."
https://cloudinary.com/glossary/rate-limit -
"As of today, 3 million developers build with Cloudinary. accomplished in only 15 months, a new user signed up every 35 seconds!"
https://cloudinary.com/blog/3-million-developers-thank-you-for-building-with-us
